BarcelonaI never imagined my brother would die. Nor did I ever imagine that a day would come when I would have to explain to my children that it was a death by suicide. Many times, at other times, I have told myself that I could not do it. In this situation what he always told me time and time again is that he didn’t know whether to tell them. How when How far would I explain them. Or what they would say, once they had heard me.
It was a wardrobe change weekend. One of my sons had accompanied me to the laundry. And there, just the two of us and without preamble or introduction, he dropped his question that made me tremble. Which I received like a slab. “How did your brother die?” My son was seven or eight years old. And I also had doubts. Answers to fill in. Questions that, in his head, were getting bigger. Meanwhile, I wanted to run away. Or to launch an SOS asking for a valid answer, an honest sentence of those that do not appear in any tutorial. I didn’t know what to say, I wasn’t at all sure what to answer. Because it is very difficult to offer answers for the creatures when you do not have them completely clear for yourself.
It is the problem of suicide. A death that causes such a magma of guilt, taboo, bitterness or questions, rhetorical and sometimes absurd, that in the end you take refuge in silence. And that’s what I did in that laundry room. Don’t answer him. Because how do you explain to children that someone has taken their own life, when they want to live it?
Fortunately and with the passage of time I have been able to answer them. I told them everything they needed to know, what they would surely have discovered by digging around like children do. Because I am very sure that, between them and their cousins, they must have been brooding over a death for a long time that their grandparents, parents or uncles had not told them about. never
And they keep asking me questions. But now about his life, not about his death. Now I tell you the story from the beginning. Not from the end. And so I can stop shaking”
Talk about your life
But the most important thing for me was that I told them who he was, what he did, what he liked or how he dressed. I showed them some photos. I reminded them that I enjoyed horses or being a camp monitor. Or that he was from Barça and that more than one afternoon, sandwich in hand, we watched some very nice First Division game together. And they smile, listening to me. And they keep asking me questions. But now about his life, not about his death. Now I tell you the story from the beginning. Not from the end. And so I can stop shaking.
The problem is quite common among people who have lost a loved one to suicide. That neither they nor I had the tools to be able to talk about it, to put the pieces of a puzzle that nobody likes to do. But we made it. That is why they are so happy that I was able to express in a book all the emotions that my brother’s death generated for me. So now they are glad that I attend the grief groups that help me so much, meetings that I have never told many of my best friends about.
Because it’s what we tend to do the most. Disguise to appear to lie I decided, for too long, that my children had not had an uncle. They didn’t hear anything about him. No photo Not even his name. I put off day after day the moment when I would muster up the courage to tell them the whole truth, as I might have done in that laundry. Interestingly, my son hardly remembers that moment. Of that interrogation that sooner or later had to come.
They didn’t know him, my brother. But they know I miss him. They know of that childhood between laughter, comics and fights when hanging posters in the room where we slept. They know about that life. The same one that I, for many years, wanted to hide.
Journalist
